John Brandon - A Million Heavens

She opened her passenger door and reached through the car and pushed open the driver’s door, which was still broken and was going to stay broken, then she walked around and got into the driver’s seat and rested her forehead against the steering wheel. Crossing campus, she’d seen a flyer Nate had pinned up. He was calling his new band Thus Poke Sarah’s Thruster. His tryouts were in two days. Cecelia opened her window and reclined her seat, not ready to be in traffic. She looked at the white sky, the sun stuck up there like the bottom of a pail. She hadn’t done anything about Nate, hadn’t taken any action, hadn’t begun to figure out what action she could take. She was afraid, was the truth. At times her anger felt stronger than her fear, but other times she felt paralyzed. And sometimes she wondered if it was Nate she was angry with or if she was fed up with the whole world and frustrated with herself. She had too many enemies. She needed to find some mindless courage. People said bullies were cowards but that wasn’t true. It was the victims who had no courage. And she’d only been Nate’s victim since she’d refused to keep on with the band. Before that, she’d benefited from his single-mindedness and from his resources. She’d been afforded the chance to perform music, to play Reggie’s songs for people who lived to hear them. Maybe in a weird way Cecelia missed Nate. She missed the gigs. She missed the band’s following, roughly a dozen fans who’d been committed enough to seem deranged. The twelve fans had been nervous around Reggie but spoke easily to Cecelia and Nate. They treated Cecelia and Nate like they were fans themselves, fans that got to play in the band. These people were overqualified community college types who showed their devotion by holding their heads against the speakers during the upbeat songs and solemnly swaying, eyes shut, during the slow numbers. They wore gloves to the shows — driving gloves, brightly colored mittens, fingerless gym gloves. They had a way of intimidating strangers who wandered into the venues. Nate had tried booking gigs in secret, with little or no publicity, but there was no escaping these fans. They had told Cecelia and Nate that if Shirt of Apes ever had T-shirts or bumper stickers or key chains made, the items would be rounded up and destroyed. The items would be confiscated and burned.

Cecelia started her car with the normal clattering of the engine and drove to the cemetery. The roads were quiet and the cemetery was quieter. She brought her car to a stop in the spot she’d sat during Reggie’s funeral. The breeze leaning in the windows carried the scent of flowers — all the bunches of cut, surviving flowers lying this way and that in every corner of the cemetery.

This time Cecelia got out of her car and walked out around the hill. She was finally going to pay her respects. She passed a pickup truck with an open trailer of lawn equipment, and half-a-dozen men were eating sandwiches, using the pickup’s hood as a table. They nodded as Cecelia passed. She looked at all the flowers everywhere. It wasn’t a normal amount. The bouquets looked like a mob that had been mowed down with machine guns.

Reggie’s grave, this time of day, was not in reach of the shade, and Cecelia was able to single it out because the stone was so shiny. The glare gave him away as recently deceased. The stone was simple, not small. It seemed like Reggie himself, no interest in pride or regret. Cecelia’s heart, for a moment, did not feel crowded in her chest. She wanted something to do with her hands. She saw now why you brought an offering, why flowers covered the entire grounds. It was so you could make a living action, be responsible for an alteration to the scene you’d entered, do something.

Cecelia stepped up to the gravestone and put her fingers to it and it wasn’t as cold as it should’ve been, like the skin of a snake. Seeing Reggie’s full name there, recorded in the most permanent way, sunk the idea of his being dead further into Cecelia’s heart. Once your name was engraved, you couldn’t do anything else. Your file was closed. No more accomplishments or kind lies. No more people to meet for the first time who might think you were interesting or merely nice or that you might rub the wrong way. No more books to read. No more midnight snacks. No more songs. Cecelia wanted to talk to Reggie. No, she wanted him to talk to her. She wanted to hear his voice, but she would’ve settled for watching him do something, anything — wrap up extension cords or tune a guitar. She owed him. It was easy to feel that. Cecelia owed Reggie.

She looked at the year of Reggie’s birth and at the other year. She knew a century from now someone would stop at this grave and feel nothing more than the broad sadness anyone felt at the death of a young person they’d never met. This someone would shake his head, thinking of himself at this age, thinking of himself when he was poised to come into his own. It didn’t have to be a century from now, Cecelia knew. It could happen tomorrow.

A strange thing had happened — strange to him, anyway. Women were interested in him. Soren’s father had his cell phone number changed but the women still called the clinic asking for him, sometimes lying to try to get to him, claiming to be his sister or niece. It wasn’t a bunch of women, but the same persistent handful over and over. They left baked goods and smokes at the nurses’ station. Women did this sort of thing, Soren’s father knew; they fell in love with prisoners and movie stars and other men they’d never met.

He hadn’t been with a woman since Soren’s mother, and he knew that was not a good thing. It was proof of cowardice, if anything, and usually there was a price to pay for cowardice. He knew he ought to spend less time in the clinic room. He ought to spend less time with no one for company but his indisposed child. It was much worse than being alone, being in the clinic room. He panicked at the idea of thinking of things to say to some woman, topics to bring up on a date or whatever. As things were, at least he never had to worry about what some woman felt like eating for dinner, about what time some woman wanted to go to bed, about what offended or placated some woman. He had enough to worry about and he could do his worrying on his own. These women were primarily interested in his son, he knew, and he didn’t want to discuss his son with anyone, especially anyone in high heels, but he kept catching himself drifting off at Soren’s bedside thinking about these women, imagining what they looked like — their legs and supple necks and petite hands. He went over and stood at his son’s bedside, feeling unsure of anything. Soren had a wild hair sticking out from his eyebrow. A coarse gray hair that wasn’t lying flat with all the others. What was he doing with a gray hair? Soren’s father thought of plucking it but he didn’t want to. He smoothed it with his fingertip over and over until it stayed in place.

She’d discovered a worthwhile use for the telescope on the balcony. In some craggy hills beyond the wrecked golf course, probably over a mile away, was a stretch of hiking trail. dannie tracked the hikers in and out of shadows, staying with them as they passed behind bristlecone thickets or permanent dunes and emerged on the other side. She had seen women take dumps, men toss beer cans into the brush. Today she had three males, about twenty-five, stoners but outdoorsmen. They had their shirts off and all of them were skinny like rock stars. One had a booklet and he kept reading passages out of it that made the other two laugh. They were the types of guys who had no one to answer to, no bosses or girlfriends or accountants or coaches. They were walking through life without shirts, cracking themselves up.